History witnesses alternative approaches to “the proposition”. The proposition has been referred to as the object of belief, disbelief, and doubt: generally as the object of propositional attitudes, that which can be said to be believed, disbelieved, understood, etc. It has also been taken to be the object of grasping, judging, assuming, affirming, denying, and inquiring: generally as the object of propositional actions, that which can be said to be grasped, judged true or false, assumed for reasoning purposes, etc. The (...) proposition has also been taken to be the subject of truth and falsity: generally as the subject of propositional properties, that which can be said to be true, false, tautological, informative, inconsistent,etc. It has also been taken as the subject and object of logical relations, e.g. that which can be said to imply, be implied, contradict, be contradicted, etc. Prima facie, such properties and relations are non-mental and objective. It has also been taken to be the resultants or products of propositional operations, usually mental or linguistic; e.g. judging, affirming, and denying have been held to produce propositions called judgments, affirmations, and negations, respectively. Propositions have also been taken to be certain declarative sentences. Finally,propositions have been taken to be meanings of certain declarative sentences. This essay is an informal, selective, and incomplete survey of alternative approaches to “the proposition” with special attention to the views of the late American philosopher Peter Hare (1935–2008)and of those who influenced him. DOI: 10.5007/1808-1711.2011v15n1p51. (shrink)

My chief aim has been to convey the thought that the application of model theoretic techniques to natural languages needn't force a distortion of intentional phenomena. I hope that at least I have succeeded in accomplishing this.

The meanings of utterances and thoughts are commonly regarded in philosophical semantics as abstract objects, called «propositions», which account for how different utterances and thoughts can be synonymous and which constitute the primary truth-bearers. I argue that meanings are instead natural properties that play causal roles in the world, that the kind of «One over Many» thinking underlying the characterization of shared meanings as abstract objects is misguided and that utterances and thoughts having truth-values in virtue of their meanings does (...) not entail that meanings themselves are truth-bearers. (shrink)

Recent literature in the Philosophy of Language has focused on a variety of puzzles about de se belief--belief about oneself formed by the use of the indexical 'I' or the reflexive pronoun 'she herself'. These puzzle cases suggest that de se belief cannot be represented in the traditional way as a two-place relation between an individual and a proposition. Nevertheless, there are some versions of this traditional analysis that have not been fully discussed in the literature. ;In this dissertation I (...) examine a number of proposals for analyzing de se belief, and show how many of these entail privileged access for the agents of self-attributed belief. Privileged access for an agent takes the form of either a proposition or a belief that only the agent can entertain. Privileged access emerges as a consequence of two-place relations of belief between believers and propositions when the proposition is construed as a first-person proposition, a first-person propositional guise, an individual essence, or a Fregean 'I' thought. In all these cases I argue that privileged access for an agent leads to counter-intuitive consequences about sentence meaning and belief content. For this reason I investigate ways to avoid privileged access altogether. I conclude that the most viable alternatives are three-place relations of belief. (shrink)

In part 4 of Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Davis rejects what he calls Fregean ideational theories, according to which the meaning of an expression is an idea; and then presents his own account, which states that, e.g., the meaning of ‘Primzahl’ in German is the property of meaning prime number. Before casting doubt on the latter ontology of meanings, I come to Frege’s defence by pointing out that he was not an advocate of the position Davis named after him because (...) Fregean senses are not lexical meanings and Fregean thoughts are not types of mental events. (shrink)

Intensional contexts are typically characterised by an apparent failure of either (A) the principle of the inter-substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate, or (B) existential generalisation. The difficulties which are seen to occur do so in contexts involving either modality or the propositional attitudes. In this paper attempts are made to determine whether or not Scheffler’s inscriptional analysis can provide a viable means of accounting for the problems which are thought to occur in intensional contexts. Somewhat unexpectedly, little effort has (...) been made in the past to address this issue. In this paper it is shown that Scheffler’s theory may be employed to account for the difficulties mentioned above, though further work needs to be done to show precisely how his analysis may be adapted so as to handle modal statements. Popular objections to Scheffler’s inscriptionalism are also addressed, particularly in the light of his theory being used to account for the problems of intensionality. It is found that, with certain qualifications, the aforesaid objections do not show Scheffler’s theory to be an unviable means of accounting for the intensionality problems. (shrink)